AWS reInvent 2018 – Key takeaways and insights

AWS reInvent 2018 At A Glance

The most awaited cloud conference of the year 2018 was ‘AWS reInvent’, held in Las Vegas at 6 different convention centers. The event unpacked technical content, hangout sessions, hands-on learning experiences and networking opportunities for more than 50,000 visitors. The whole agenda of AWS re:Invent conference was to present itself as a top leader in the cloud industry. In fact, AWS is arguably the most profitable and important business of Amazon.

AWS reInvent has become bigger and better since its launch in 2012. Amazon lines up the most awaited announcements for this event. 2018’s most significant announcements at reInvent were related to database, analytics, security & compliance, and machine learning to help developers create new applications. We could clearly see AWS pushing its boundaries. And the proof of this are the next-generation cloud services they provided above anything else. Services have been curated for a particular task to be carried out. The utter size of the event highlights on why cloud is crucial and what it is capable of was humongous last year. AWS reInvent provides the perfect platform to interact with potential customers and partners.

Global Partner Summit too was hosted at reInvent 2018 which provided a number of opportunities to the members of AWS Partner Network (APN) to connect, collaborate and discover.

Key product, services and features announcements that raised eyebrows:

AWS Lambda

AWS lambda is a compute service that runs your back-end code in response to events such as object uploads to Amazon S3 buckets, updates to Amazon DynamoDB data tables and Amazon Kinesis dreams. Once you upload your code to lambda, the service handles all the capacity scaling, patching, and administration of the infrastructure to run your code in addition to providing visibility into your performance by publishing real-time metrics and logs on Amazon Cloud Watch. All you need to do is write the code. The cost AWS lambda is very low and it does not require any upfront investment. When you use AWS lambda, your fee per request is low and only for the time your code runs. The time of the code is in increments of 100 milliseconds.

Lambda Layers

Earlier, one has to package and deploy the shared code with all functions. Now, you have the ease to put common components in a ZIP file and upload it as a Lambda Layer. Your function can reference the libraries in layers. Few of many advantages of using Lambda Layers:

Make your function code smaller with solely focus on what you want to build.

This also speeds up the deployments because the code packaged and uploaded is minimum.

Lambda API

AWS added this feature in late 2018, to make any programming language easier to write lambda functions. So, it is good news that now AWS Lambda supports custom runtime APIs via Lambda API.

AWS Firecracker

AWS Firecracker is a new virtualization technology that makes use of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). You can launch lightweight micro-virtual machines (micro-VMs) in non-virtualized environments within a fraction of seconds. It helps in taking advantages of the security and workload isolation provided by traditional VMs and the resource efficiency provided by containers. Firecracker is written in Rust to prevent security threats. With the launch of Firecracker, AWS has opened up an opportunity for collaborators since it is an open-source project.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

According to AWS, “Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is a purpose-built ledger database that provides a complete and cryptographically verifiable history of all changes made to your application data.” The data stored in Amazon QLDB is absolute and verifiable. This means you can trust your data in ledger. Its features allow you to store data which requires data integrity, completeness, and verifiability.

Amazon Managed Blockchain

It is a fully managed service for creating and organizing blockchain networks using Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum – open source frameworks. Blockchain helps to build a network where different parties can complete transactions without the need of trusted authority. But setting up scalable network brings complexities and is also hard to manage. Amazon Managed Blockchain ease the process to a scalable blockchain network. For analysis and detailed insights, Managed Blockchain provides a copy of your blockchain network activity which is stored in Amazon QLDB.

Amazon EC2 A1 Instances

With the introduction of A1 instances, AWS has increased its number of instances types to 117.

AWS Outposts

One of the top cloud trend 2019 is the adoption of hybrid cloud. AWS plans to dive in the hybrid cloud space with Outposts. AWS Outposts bring AWS services, infrastructure and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. Outposts are important for many reasons. Regardless of innovative steps in cloud security, organizations still have different concerns. Many organizations have the perception that core intellectual property belongs to hardware that the organization can really own and touch.

Other key announcements that you can’t afford to miss:

Adding to the already existing 200 Machine Learning services, AWS announced thirteen new services. Amazon also expanded its storage capabilities by introducing 8 new storage services taking a greater lead on its contemporaries.

This reInvent, AWS made sure to invest in the emerging technologies. Hence, it has invested in IoT and Edge Computing. It also introduced four new advancements to build capable IoT applications.

AWS has introduced AWS Control Centre service to organize multiple accounts.

A regular trend followed by Amazon is putting out commercial services on open source software. It has launched,

AWS App Mesh for managing micro-services, running in AWS. It uses Envoy, an open source edge and service proxy.

Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Kafka), which is a fully managed service to undertake streaming data. It uses Apache Kafka.

AWS has tried to paint a broader picture of high-priority security notifications and compliance status of all the accounts pertaining to AWS Inspector, AWS Macie, AWS GuardDuty and other third-party tools through the release of AWS Security Hub.

It has also launched a cost-free tool called, AWS Well-Architected Tool to enable reviewing and comparison of workloads.

With AWS Outpost and on-premise RDS, AWS has acquired the capability to allow any of its services to run on-premise.

Our Experience

Centilytics attended reInvent 2018 and was proud to be a sponsor of a mega event. We were present at booth 2313 at Venetian Expo Hall. Manning the booth has never been fun but re:Invent is a different story. All credit goes to great interactions we had with customers and partners. We could experience why AWS reInvent is one of the biggest cloud events. Through interactions, we were able to showcase to attendees how Centilytics, an intelligent cloud management platform is helping them manage, secure and optimize their entire cloud Infrastructure.

Attendees got insights into our different solutions like cloud visibility, optimization & allocation, governance & reporting, and security & health. All these solutions very well aligned with the vision of reflecting why Centilytics is an intelligent cloud management platform and give customers a one-stop solution.

AWS is successful not only because it has great technology but also because they have strong partner eco-system. Having said that, 2018’s reInvent was not at all a disappointment for any of its audiences, be it developers (“builders”), decision-makers or end-users. We are looking forward to participating in upcoming reInvents at a bigger level.

Cloud Evangelists are CMI's in house ambassadors for the entire Cloud ecosystem. They are responsible for propagating the doctrine of cloud computing and help community members make informed decisions.